Couple years ago some friends that were getting married, myself, and some other mutual friends were out for dinner, and somehow we got on the subject of my dating life, or lack thereof.

His fiance made the remark that my standards must be too high because I noted one thing that would happen whenever I wind up married, is that there will be at least one computer in the house that is mine, and only mine, because I can't stand sharing a computer with someone else. I did that with my first computer in high school, and it was such a mess. When I finally bought a laptop for school, I just let the family use my old desktop however they wanted, because I had my own system that was far better anyway.

She tells me that my standards are too high, and that she'd never let my friend have his own computer for fear of him looking at porn or using it to communicate with other women to cheat on her.

I just told her, "Okay look, I'm an IT professional, and there are plenty of ways I could do all of that without my girlfriend or wife finding out, or at the very least making it very hard for them to do so."

"Oh really, like what?"

"I could install an operating system on a different partition that can only be booted into if you select the right buttons on the keyboard to bring up the boot menu. Hell, I can install special operating systems that run on a thumb drive so it's not even on the main system to begin with. I can use an e-mail address that's made up of a name she'd never guess because she's never heard me use it before. Several browsers now have an incognito mode, which allows me to browse privately without leaving any traces. You can buy pay as you go phones that don't bill you at home, so I'd have a phone she'd never know about. More to that, I could just use Google Voice for any text messaging needs, because those route to a different number entirely.

If I want to be sneaky, I can be sneaky, and it will take very little effort on my part to do so. Any future girlfriends and/or wives should be more concerned about that than whether or not I have a computer that only I have access to, not that I would cheat on someone to begin with, but my point is I could be very good at it via technology if I really wanted to."

She just scowled at me and I went back to eating my nachos.

The ironic yet unfortunate outcome is my friend did end up cheating on her, and they didn't even last two years. I don't know all the details, and I still think he's done an incredibly shitty thing, but either way I think my point was proven: if someone wants to cheat, they will find a way, so having overbearing requirements on your partner is not a safeguard against that, and will likely push them closer to that outcome.